This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.

In Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London’s work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London’s “Story of a Typhoon” to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.

This work provides information for approximately 2850 American scientists deceased through 1920. It utilizes standard published biographical sources (biographical directories, dictionaries, and indexes), as well as obituary and similar notices for some persons not in standard sources. Arranged alphabetically by personal name, the Biographical Index includes full name, year of birth and death, scientific field(s) in which the person was active, identification by occupational category, reference to unpublished material described in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, and references to published biographical sources. All fields of science are covered, including mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, the biological sciences, psychology and anthropology, as well as some persons noted for contributions in engineering, invention, and medicine. An index of the scientists by scientific field appears at the end of the work. Beyond its primary value as a reference tool for the location of information on particular persons, the Biographical Index also serves to identify the population of scientists in America who lived during the period from colonial times to 1920. Selection of names was based on a systematic review of certain works such as the Dictionary of American Biography and other specialized indexes such as E.S. Barr's Index to Biographical Fragments in Unspecialized Scientific Journals, obituary notices in American journals indexed in the Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers (1867-1925), lists of deceased scientists in American Men of Science, and other sources. While eminent scientists are included, a number of less notable personages also are listed. This bibliography is suitable for college and research libraries and public libraries of all sizes, and for individuals interested in the history of American science.